Justified, one of TV’s more underappreciated, overlooked dramas, ends one season-long story and sets up another in a season finale Tuesday that’s both harrowing and unexpectedly poignant.

The normally laconic, taciturn U.S. deputy marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) is caught uncharacteristically off-balance as he watches his case against the murderous Crowe clan, led by hillbilly patriarch Darryl Crowe Jr. (Michael Rapaport), fall apart at the seams. Givens is about to make some questionable decisions — decisions that cleverly set up a three-way confrontation to come in what will be Justified’s final season next spring.

That confrontation will come down to Givens — spoiler alert: Justified’s lead character does not die in the season finale — childhood acquaintance and lifelong frenemy, Boyd Crowder, (the also underappreciated Walton Goggins), and the woman they both love in distinct, ways, Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter).

As the finale begins, Ana is in prison, tunnelling deeper into a cold hardened depression after being set up for a murder she didn’t commit. Givens and Boyd Crowder are locked out on the outside, seemingly helpless to intervene.

It would all end well — except, of course, then there wouldn’t be a cliffhanger. Or a reason for a final season.

Also Watch
Grace and dignity. Ken Burns’ heartwarming documentary The Address, referring to Abraham Lincoln’s 270-word speech, the Gettysburg Address, that helped forge a nation during the American Civil War , is no dry recitation of history. Nor is it what you might think. It’s an account of pupils’ efforts to memorize the Gettysburg Address — then recite it in public — at a Vermont boarding school for at-risk boys. The Address is both poignant and profound, and will surprise those who believe that once you’ve seen one Ken Burns’ film you’ve seen them all. (Tuesday/PBS)

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile